Designing for the Power to Act Together in organisations : the case of a business process

Abstract

With regard to transformations of the economic environment and structural changes in companies which now conceptualize their performance on the basis of their cross-functional processes, it is essential to understand the efficiency levers that organisations employ to cope with customer requests. One of these levers is cross-functional cooperation between actors who are members of the same process, based on a new kind of collective activity : cross-functional and transactional collective activity (Motte & Haradji, 2010 ; Poret, 2015). This collective activity involves actors who are members of a same process cooperating by crossing over the organisation’s various boundaries. Taking an understanding of the modes of coordination which form the basis for cooperation between members of the same cross-functional process, this research highlights the existence of instruments (Cooperative Transitional Instruments (Poret, ibid)) that allow these actors to cross the organisation’s typical boundaries in order to cooperate, and proposes a criteria for the IT and organisational system in order to durably anchor cross-functionality and enable the Power to Act Together at the heart of organisations.